Category Archives: Food

When I got a copy of the cookbook, Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid, I had no idea what Burmese cooking was even like. As it turns out, geography is a pretty good guide: To the west, Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar) is bordered by India and Bangladesh; to the north by China, and to the east by Thailand and Laos.

When I first sat down and read through it, I wished I had a whole month to cook exclusively from the book. I only had a few days, so I picked just one recipe to start with: Burmese Style Chicken Salad. Packed up for lunch with steamed rice and a lime-shallot dressing, it was an easy, healthy, and delicious meal.

Then Mr. Bookdwarf and I planned a party: Spice-rubbed Jerky, Fluffy Lemongrass Fish, Mandalay Carrot Salad, and a tapioca-and-coconut custard.

Everything was served with small bowls of hot chili oil, crispy shallots, and a powder made from dried shrimp that were reconstituted and crushed. The odd-looking shrimp powder was key, functioning like a southeast-Asian bottarga: You wouldn’t eat it by the spoonful, but sprinkled onto anything else it added mouthwatering complexity and richness.

Who knew that a plain-looking carrot salad could be so flavorful. Served in a bowl, you might pass on this–but that would be a huge mistake. This is THE BEST CARROT SALAD EVER.

Dressed with a lot of lime, fish sauce, roasted peanuts, toasted chickpea flour, and cilantro, this deceptively simple looking salad packs a lot of flavor. And it’s easy to make, too. I just grated some carrots bought at the farmers market on a cheese grater then tossed it with the other ingredients. That’s all.

The beef dish was fascinating: Thin sliced, rubbed with spices, and dried slowly in the oven for a couple hours, it became light and slightly stiff.
Then we fried it in hot oil until it was crispy and the turmeric in the spice rub was a rich red color. (Mr. Bookdwarf’s nails remained yellow for days). A now-closed Thai restaurant we used to go to in Union Square had a dish a little like this, and it was one of our favorites. Now that we know how to make it at home I have a feeling it’s going to wind up on party menus again and again.

The photo of the Fluffy Lemongrass Fish doesn’t do it justice. You take a firm textured white fish–hake is what was freshly caught the day I shopped–and poach it in water with turmeric added. It gives the fish a lovely yellow hue. Meanwhile, you grind some shallots, garlic, ginger, and lemongrass into a paste.

Then once it’s cooled for a few minutes, you flake the fish into smaller pieces. Then saute the lemongrass paste in a large saute pan or wok for about five minutes. Add the fish and break it down even more in the pan. Transfer to a bowl, season with fried shallots, lime juice, and salt. Again, it’s a deceptively simple dish.

I decided to make the Tapioca Coconut Delight because it was something I could make ahead of time. It’s a tapioca base topped with a coconut custard. Sounds simple. Something went wrong however. My tapioca never fully set and when I tried to spread the coconut custard–which was delicious by the way–it smeared and ruined the top. It didn’t look pretty, but my guests ate it up anyway and scored it a victory. I have no idea what went wrong. Next time I might just make the custard and turn it into an ice cream. Or perhaps I should try again. After all, no one likes to feel defeated by a dessert.

I’m looking forward to working my way through more of the cookbook – the entire chicken section looks fantastic, especially one called “Village Boys Chicken,” which is supposed to be a recipe for how you’d cook a chicken if you’d stolen it. First, I have to steal a chicken…

Note: More photos of the cooking process are here. It’s becoming more obvious that I need better lighting: As it got dark outside, my pictures got darker. Soon, I think, I’m going to get some decent photo lights.

People constantly ask me what we make for dinner now that I’ve graduated from culinary school. Maybe they imagine I’m whipping up souffles and Beef Bourguignon, but the reality is that I still work a full time job and neither I nor Mr. Bookdwarf gets home before 7.

Over the years we’ve developed some easy but tasty weeknight meals. Our most common weeknight meal is usually a stir-fry made with whatever we have in the fridge. It’s really great when you get some stuff from the farmer’s market. We usually make it with ground pork, bell pepper, cabbage, and carrots, but you could do just about any combination. Last night it was pork, bell pepper, cabbage, kohlrabi, and corn. Everything’s an estimate, we don’t measure, and it never comes out exactly the same, but it’s usually good and pretty quick.

Half a cabbage and/or whatever other vegetables you’ve got around the house. This time it was kohlrabi and corn, but it could be broccoli or snow peas or whatever was at the market or whatever’s going to go bad first if you don’t eat it tonight.

Hot peppers

A knob of ginger about an inch and a half long

3-4 cloves of garlic

Cilantro or thai basil

If you have them on hand, mushrooms and water chestnuts are nice.

Sesame oil, 2 tsp or so

Hot sauce (garlic-chili sauce or sriracha or both), I use a lot!

Fish sauce, 1 TBS

Oyster sauce, 2 TBS

Put your meat in a big bowl, and grate in ginger and garlic. Throw in about a half-tablespoon of sesame oil, and about a tablespoon of hot sauce, maybe more if you like it spicy, and some fish sauce. Use at least a tablespoon of fish sauce. Throw in your diced bell pepper as well, why not. Stir it around.

Cut your carrots into little ovals so they’re about the same size. Set them in one bowl. Cut your other veggies up and set them aside in the same way, and : You’ll wind up with four or five bowls of assorted sliced vegetables.

Heat up a big pan with a little oil. You’re going to par-cook your veggies in batches, not all the way through but until they’re slightly tender.

Start with the carrots, then set them aside. You may need to add a little more oil. Then cook your other veggies. You can pile them in with the carrots if you want. Then your onions, and set them aside. Then your hot peppers. You may need to add a little more oil between batches, or not. Just enough to keep stuff from sticking.

Then take everything out of the pan and get it good and hot and fry up your meat. Don’t stir it for the first few minutes: You want it to brown. At this point Mr. Bookdwarf usually goes to wash a couple of dishes because otherwise he gets impatient staring at it, and stirs, and it won’t brown right.

Once it’s browned on one side, stir it. If you’re using ground meat, now’s a good time to make sure it’s broken into approximately even bits. Let it brown a little more – but don’t cook it so much that it dries out entirely. When it’s just about cooked all the way through, add your par-cooked veggies and stir until everything’s hot. Add your mushrooms and water chestnuts, if you’re using them. When the mushrooms have softened, drizzle on about a tablespoon of oyster sauce and your cilantro or basil. Did you forget anything else? All your ingredients should be in by now.

Stir everything around a little more. Taste it. Make sure everything is thoroughly hot and all the flavors are blended. Maybe add more hot sauce. You can always make it more spicy.

Put it over brown rice. It’s good garnished with more basil or with a bit of lime.

I have every single one of Thomas Keller’s cookbooks. And no, even as a culinary school graduate, I haven’t cooked anything from Under Pressure, the sous-vide treatise/coffee-table book, but I’ve lingered over every page. I do make the fried chicken from Ad Hoc At Home, and I’ve made a handful of other dishes. Mostly, these are inspirational and aspirational. Making a Thomas Keller recipe, even if you take shortcuts, is still generally better than following lesser masters to the letter.

The latest from Keller is the Bouchon Bakery cookbook. And yeah, it’s an inspiration. I don’t care if it’s already over 100 degrees in the apartment: I’m going to preheat the oven, turn the fan to high, and tell Mr. Bookdwarf to fix me a cold drink, because it’s time to start cooking Thomas Keller dishes again.

Earlier this summer, Artisan sent me a review copy of Mourad Lahlou’s new cookbook, Mourad: New Moroccan and asked me to give it a try, in competition with staff from a number of other bookstores around the country. We packed some lemons in salt and put them in the cupboard, tried to decide what to cook, and then got incredibly busy doing other stuff, most significantly culinary school. Now that I’m in class from 4:30 PM to 12:30 AM twice a week, I barely have time to cook at home! It was only this past weekend that we finally managed to get our acts together around the house and throw this thing down. Normally we’d do a cookbook-centric party as a pot luck, but with this one, and on this schedule, I wound up doing all the cooking myself, with the odd assist from Mr. Bookdwarf on measuring, washing, roasting, and running out to the store for extra turmeric and paprika on Saturday evening.

The Menu

We did have the advantage of knowing what the other bookstores had cooked, and were able to try different recipes. So our menu worked out to be four courses and bread:

Julia Moskin recently recently reviewedMourad: New Moroccan in comparison with a more traditional Moroccan cookbook, The Food of Morocco, from Paula Wolfert. I think she does a good job of explaining where Mourad Lahlou fits into the world. He’s definitely a fascinating voice for a cuisine that hasn’t really had a star turn in the US, and he’s doing some really interesting stuff modernizing a traditional menu.

I should caution you, that this book is not for the faint of heart. Lahlou’s approach reminds me of Thomas Keller’s: The ultimate product is fantastic, but there are tons of intermediate steps to get there. Traditional Moroccan cuisine draws on labor-intensive, all-day-in-the-kitchen roots, and Lahlou keeps those while bringing in the precision and demands of contemporary restaurant food. I was pleased to see that Lahlou provides both volume and weight measures for everything, which makes it easier to follow his lead. However, his measurements are oddly precise: One spice blend called for 40.2 grams of turmeric, and 0.3 grams of star anise. My digital kitchen scale is great, but it’s just not tenth-of-a-gram precise. Maybe Charlie Sheen has a kitchen scale that goes to the half-gram, but I don’t.

I’d also have liked to see more substitution suggestions, but that’s a quibble. Our bean dish called for corona beans and Lahlou helpfully listed several alternatives, but on the other hand, we did spend a few minutes in the store with our phones looking up the difference between green cardamom and black cardamom, before throwing the green cardamom into our spice grinder.

The Process

You do have a spice grinder, don’t you? Because if you’re cooking from Mourad, you’re going to be toasting and grinding your own spices. You can do it with a mortar and pestle, a blender, or just a big heavy pan, but a spice grinder is really handy. We still copped out and used store-bought harissa, but the other spices we did toast and blend ourselves. A lot of the other steps in the book are like this: He’s doing it the right way, and it’s going to be amazing, but it’s going to involve a dozen steps and you’ll wish you had a sous chef. Mr. Bookdwarf, although helpful, doesn’t count, even if he does say “yes chef” when I ask him to get me something from the pantry. The chicken was the easiest dish, with a marinade before grilling, five minutes on the grill, and vinaigrette after. It produced a delicious and tender dish that disappeared rapidly. The bread, too, was pretty easy, at least compared to a multi-day whole-wheat sourdough. The pepper salad wasn’t terribly hard, although each individual component required several steps: It’s easy enough to roast some peppers, and it’s easy enough to peel a ton of garlic and poach it in olive oil, and it’s easy enough to pack a half-dozen lemons in salt for a month. But each step takes time, so you have to plan ahead.

We were most surprised, I think, by the curry ice cream. I guess you’re asking for a surprise when you make something like that. It’s basically a creme anglaise (yeah, I’m in culinary school, so what?) infused with Lahlou’s curry spice blend, and frozen in an ice cream maker. And it’s basically amazing. It’s strongly spiced without being spicy-hot, and a beautiful, dessert-like shade of yellow from the turmeric. We might even add more hot pepper next time, but we’ll definitely be making that again. And the garlic confit. Oh hell yes.

The Result

I don’t feel vain saying this party went well. It was, honestly, an amazing meal. The preserved lemons were not something I’d had before, and we thought at first that we’d done them wrong because they were oddly slippery. But I’m definitely going to use them more in the future. Same with his garlic confit– the garlic, in fact, was one of the few things that was simple to make and will likely be a staple for me. You just peel a bunch of cloves of garlic, cover in olive oil, set on low heat to simmer until soft and golden, and put it on anything and everything. The roasted peppers were fantastic, the baked bean dish rich and satisfying in a manner I’d never seen before, and the rolls were soft and warm and, when topped with harissa and chicken, incredible. I also don’t feel like I’m understating things when I say it was a ton of work: I started cooking on Saturday afternoon with the spice blends and ice cream base, and didn’t finish until about 8:00 on Sunday when the beans came out of the oven for the third course. I’m looking forward to learning more about Moroccan food, and making more recipes from this book, although maybe not quite so many all at once.

Last night was my first class at culinary school. I found the whole thing very fun and intense. Eight hours of school after a full work day will be challenging but rewarding. Last night’s topic was fruits and nuts. I made granola and a berry gratin with creme fraiche and brown sugar. Here are some not very good photos:

I’ll be bringing my camera with me to class, so hopefully have better photos of the whole experience.

I have a confession to make: I didn’t like tomatoes until just a few years ago. I didn’t like tomato sauce either except when on pizza and only if it was minimal and certainly not that chunky style. I’m not sure how to explain this but suffice it to say, I was missing out on some great food. The turn around happened after I tried some heirloom tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil drizzled with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, a classic dish. It’s like a bright light went off in my head and I could imagine all the possibilities of cooking with tomatoes.

Move forward in time and now my absolute favorite summer meal is the Panzanella salad, simply bread and tomatoes. It’s taken me a few summers to perfect making it. At first, I kept wanting to add more vegetables. Now it’s simply shallots, cucumber, tomatoes, fresh basil, feta cheese and homemade croutons dressed with a easy red wine vinaigrette. Behold!

As long as there are heirloom tomatoes available, I make this as often as possible. I think making the croutons gives it an extra deliciousness. I simply cut up some bread, toss with olive oil, salt, and dried herbs. Then bake it at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. Voila! They taste good enough to eat like crackers. Here’s a close up so you can see what’s going on in there.

We threw a birthday party for Heather’s mom on Sunday, which meant we needed cake. Being who we are, we made a practice cake a few weeks ago. We went right to Flour, the cookbook from Joanne Chang’s Flour Bakery in Boston. We chose the Midnight Chocolate Cake with Milk Chocolate Frosting. It’s not an ultra-dense death-by-chocolate style, but it’s still got a rich chocolatey flavor and a nice tight crumb. The author describes it as “the simplest way I know how to make a cake.” I can assure you it’s not very simple, but if you read the instructions twice before starting, it’ll come out fine. It turned out we didn’t need the practice cake, but saying “practice” definitely has a nice ring to it as an excuse to have dessert for breakfast all week.

Mr. Bookdwarf did think the milk chocolate frosting in our first edition wasn’t chocolatey enough, so when we made it the second time, we used dark chocolate. I thought it was great both times, but he’s the chocolate fiend, so I let him call it on that one.

Both times, we wound up with about twice as much buttercream frosting as we needed. Fortunately, a friend came up with an amazing, and possibly dangerous idea: Use the frosting to take another Chang specialty over the top.